Skill A Day: Day 21 Creative Meeting of Needs

It’s Wednesday and once more I find myself juggling the needs of my 2 dogs and a nearly 4 month old human (and the needs of the ducks, but frankly theirs are a bit simpler to meet). The human arrived a bit earlier than usual this morning, throwing the morning routine rather helter skelter (side note why does spell check not recognize ‘helter skelter’? Does no one but me use this phrase anymore? Hmm).

As such I didn’t have time to run the dogs around outside before the niece arrived. By 9am Zora was set on reminding me of this failure.

So with dozing baby in my arms, the dogs and I played a verbal cue game. With me walking to the different rooms in the house, could the dogs on verbal cue alone correctly go “on your bed,” “Kennel Up” and “on the couch” when asked. In our house of 5 rooms, one of which is the kitchen, 3 of them have a dog bed (“on your bed”), crate (“kennel up”) and couch or human bed (“on the couch”), and the 4th has both a dog bed and a crate. Why yes this is a home set up to include canines, why do you ask?

The dogs followed me (or ran) from room to room and moved from surface to surface earning praise and dog treats. After 15min both were smiling and panting content to then choose a surface in the living room and nap. The small human had also fallen asleep. Success!